The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript that has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Welcome back, everybody at the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. It’s been a few months that we didn’t release any new episode, and so I’m excited to start again. Today with me, there is my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, hello.

Simone Cicero:
And we have two exceptional guests that I want to introduce to you, Jack du Rose, and Aron Fischer. Those two guys are both involved in the core team that runs the project called Colony. Also, the hosts of fantastic podcast that I am such a big fan of is called Collectively Intelligent. It’s been releasing a lot of very important conversations and very, I would say relevant conversations around the blockchain and this interplay with the human systems basically. Essentially, I’m really looking forward to having this chat with you guys. First of all, welcome, Jack.

Jack du Rose:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Simone Cicero:
And Aron. So, welcome.

Aron Fischer:
Hello.

Simone Cicero:
So, guys, first question that I was thinking about is probably just a brief introduction to our listeners about what Colony is, and most importantly, I would say, what kind of role is seeking to play in the ecosystem around the DAOs and these thing of which we’re talking about.

Jack du Rose:
All right. Well, we see Colony as being a DAO framework. So, it’s a pretty holistic data framework. It’s intended to be a way that you can get up and running with everything that the DAO needs to be doing on-chain in about 90 seconds, from zero to DAO, 90 seconds. It’s really focused on on-chain governance. And from that perspective, it’s — by on-chain governance, we mean that when a group of people is able to make a decision together, their decision will actually directly cause the consequence that they were seeking to make. So, there’s not some kind of signaling growth that’s going on, that then has to be enacted by some other trusted third-party. Rather, it’s a system of rules that allows people to work together, make decisions, and actually cause that decision to manifest.

Aron Fischer:
Jack said it right, we want to be this DAO framework. That means when we don’t want to be very prescriptive. So, when people launch those on some blockchain, there’s often a very rigid hierarchy or set of rules and set of votes that need to be taken and proposals submitted. We did not want to do that. We wanted to create a far more flexible framework that it empowers people to take decisions collectively, to take actions collectively and does not get in the way. So, yes, we’re trying to make it easy to collaborate, easy to coordinate, but at the same time, allow them to leverage the power of blockchain smart contract platforms for when they are necessary to win in dispute resolution, and if there’s disagreements. And in all other instances, we try to get out of the way and just make it easy for people to use the systems and to hide the complexity as much as we can.

Simone Cicero:
The target as I understand is very much that of the team, let’s say, the teams that run the organization. So, the interesting idea that I think we are pointing out here is that there is this reference to something that self-executes. So, basically, it works according to the rules. And these basically removes the need for power over, for something that imposes the rules from the top. The rules are there, are written in the contract. So, I think there is this powerful idea of overcoming the middlemen, let’s say. Am I right, in this idea of DAOs, of which we are talking about?

Jack du Rose:
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s key to it, really, is that there is no trusted intermediary whose job it is to execute on things. And I think from an organizational perspective, and from a design perspective, and how this all works, we were really very inspired by systems like holacracy or sociocracy, I suppose. Actually, more generally, the whole responsive organization movement, about pushing the authority to the edges of the organization so that the people who do the work are the ones with the decision-making authority. Yeah, that was a key guiding principle in how we thought about everything within Colony.

Aron Fischer:
And indeed, we have the ability now to separate the authority to make a decision and the responsibility for enforcing the decision. And often those two were one in the same in a person in a role. Now, we can move the role of enforcing decisions to the blockchain and move the ability to take decisions out to the periphery of the organization. And that’s where that, your comment, I think, on teams comes from. What we try to do is make all decisions as local as possible directly by the people who are influenced by them and not coming down some long chain of command, some top down hierarchy.

So, in that sense, yes, teams are just — The smaller the unit that can take a decision, the better it is. Because that’s more flexible, more agile, and they’re more likely to have the correct knowledge, domain knowledge for most day-to-day decisions. So, specifically, we’re not talking about a proposal for a quarterly plan or an annual budget. We’re really talking about the day-to-day decisions that go in any company, any club, all the little day-to-day decisions that guide the actions of the members. And it’s all of those that we want to enable, in a completely decentralized trustless, or at least potentially, such a setting.

Simone Cicero:
Can we basically interpret these as commoditization, the componentization of organizing; like, something like becoming a utility or something that is pervasive, ubiquitous, cheap, easy to use, much more than it is now today with bureaucracies, I mean?

Jack du Rose:
I think quite possibly. And I think maybe even more specifically than that, the sort of commoditization, if you want to put it that way, of these new, more exotic forms of organization, because the sort of traditional hierarchy is a pretty well understood thing, by and large. It’s so common that people just have a fundamental understanding of what a corporate hierarchy looks like and does. But I think that these newer and more responsive agile forms of organizing that are really more suited to the modern world, and its greater complexity and faster rates of change. I think those things are very much harder for people to understand. I think they can understand the problem. But I think that the organizational structure and operating model is much, much harder for people to understand.

And then if you look at systems like holacracy, where you’ve got a big thick manual that really has to be followed quite dogmatically in order for it to work effectively, it’s just very hard for people to follow. It’s hard because everybody in the organization needs to understand this stuff, and to be following the rules. And so I think that there is an opportunity for software to replace that rulebook. I often liken it to the difference between a board game and a video game. With a board game, you really need to learn the rules, understand the rules, and play according to that understanding of the rules. But with a video game, you can only play by the rules. You can’t break the rules, because they’re baked into the system, and therefore it’s a lot easier to pick up and get started. And yeah, that’s broadly what I think we’re doing with Colony.

Stina Heikkila:
I understand your idea that you want to make distributing power to the edges more efficient by using those kind of protocols. And to reduce the hassle, let’s say, of having to know those big rulebooks of more participatory systems, let’s say. So, I’m curious about this, like, you have to put in place those protocols, and someone has to put their brain in it, of course. So, how much does that role of designing that and programming that essentially, just replace who decides? Or how do you deal with that design decisions upstream? To not interfere with something that should be distributed?

Jack du Rose:
From what we’ve seen, there’s two ways of going about it. There’s the sort of bootstrapping approach, where you’ve got the initial people who basically decide, and then they see how it works. And if it works appropriately, then great. If not, then they change things. But what we’ve seen in some organizations that are already of a certain size, is that they sort of follow the advice process in which somebody takes the lead of proposing what something ought to be. And they open it out to advice, and they listen to that advice. And then as with the advice process, they can either take it or leave it and then enact the thing. And if people disagree with it, then they kind of just opt out with their feet.

Aron Fischer:
Yeah. And we should not — A lot of these decisions end up being non-controversial. It’s not that there’s big fights over these parameters, but people I have suggestions for changing them, because they want to make the work easier for themselves and for everyone. And very often, it’s not that hard to convince people to change these things. You know, we’re not talking about coercive changes to make someone dictator, whatever. They’re not highly controversial, not highly fought over. So, in that sense, it doesn’t come up as often as you’d think, because we’re not talking about enforcing the content of decisions. We’re talking right now about the decisions for how to make decisions. And there, it’s much easier to find broad agreement across people who disagree on the content.

Jack du Rose:
And actually, people can make those changes. So, the way things work in Colony is by a system that we call Lazy Consensus, which is something we basically cribbed off the Apache Foundation, or the Apache community. And in that people make what we call a motion, which is something that is going to happen unless people stop it. So, yeah, that principle even further, I suppose, is drawn from the sociocratic kind of idea of is it — I think it’s from sociocracy, at least — is it safe enough to try? This is going to happen unless somebody really disagrees with it. And yeah, anybody can disagree with it. So, somebody could propose some new parameters for some part of the organization. And then it will just happen as long as nobody disagrees with it. But if somebody did think it was inappropriate, then they could object. And then a vote would take place over those parameters.

Aron Fischer:
And crucially, for most decisions that have technical nature, there’s sites where people are very much against something, there’s elements where people are very much in favor, and there’s a lot of gray zone where most people are sort of unsure. And any system that requires agreement a priori, across the board, before you can make any changes are going to be very static. But in this gray zone, where people are unsure, you want to enable a lot of movements, things being tried out. And so with this motion, if there’s someone who has an idea that I think this is going to be better if we tweak this parameter, install this extension, or even change the decision-making parameter in this team. And nobody is sure enough to say, actually, I definitely disagree, I’m going to oppose this.

So, then it will likely move forward. So, that enables Colony to be very dynamic, and experimental, and to find — faster to find the right settings. Because I think it’s far more — This is a very new space, and organizations need to learn how to use this kind of software. We all need to learn how to use these systems, I mean, culturally, socially. So, to allow for this relatively easy adaptation and constant changing of parameters within a space that as long as there’s no strong objections to trying something. I mean, I don’t have a punchline, it’s just, I like this dynamism this easy — [crosstalk]

Simone Cicero:
You’re talking about this sociocratic consent, that is what also Jack mentioned before, this idea inspired by sociocracy, that there is an algorithm to take decisions, basically. So, there’s steps to do and then the decision is taken.

Aron Fischer:
I agree. But I was specifically trying to say there’s a big difference between saying, I want to do this, are you in favor, and I want to do this, are you against it? Because if you’re not certain enough that you’re against it, does not mean you’re necessarily in favor. It just means you’re okay for it to move along. So, to phrase the question of, like, this will happen unless someone objects, makes it a lot easier to get things moving, a lot easier to get things tried out, and ends up with a lot less bureaucracy.

Simone Cicero:
That’s actually what I was reinforcing, because this difference between consensus and consent, consensus is exactly what you describe, and the sociocratic consent is the process, the struggles he brings about to reach this consent. But the question – my provocation is – my experience of sociocracy is terribly slow. So, I’m an entrepreneur, I don’t want to just do governance because it’s nice to do. I don’t have this interest to spend time in doing governance, shared governance if this is not needed. And so I see that essentially, in your code, I like it that there is some hard-coded urgency to move forward. You know, it’s like, it’s okay, we can discuss. But there are some rules that self-executes at some point and I wish it could be more configurable, let’s say, but at the end of day, it’s not really, I think, a problem of configurations here. It’s a problem of creating these affordances so things can happen maybe faster, but the messy need to build the capabilities to do so.

The question is really about how the technology can overcome this, and in what ways these new technological affordances can really make organizing less messy than it is, in the traditional organizations. What do you think about that? So, what is this, really, to what extent that technology can enable this? One thing I was thinking about, is, for example, the feature that Colony allows to create money, to create the money inside the system, so that you can suddenly move away from the market and create this move to a credit system. That would be great. Another thing that we should explore with your colonies. And I was also curious to know if you can mention some existing project that can make it also tangible; how, for example, these internal currencies are being used, or in general, give a little bit more of a use case in relationship to what we were discussing here.

Jack du Rose:
Okay. There’s a few things there. So, the first thing I want to jump on is sociocracy being terribly slow. And I want to clarify that Colony is not sociocracy in code. It’s a mishmash of lots of different ideas from lots of different places. That’s just one example of it. And I think where Colony differs from, really, every other DAO framework is that Colony biases heavily towards action. Whereas everything else, as far as I know, bias is towards inaction. Because everything requires consensus. Whereas, Colony just requires people not to disagree. And we have this forcing function of time marching on, which is the opportunity for people to disagree. So, people can set the amount of time that they want to allow for people to disagree to something, which could be as long or short as they like, depending on the nature of the organization. That’s the first part.

And I think that the bias towards action in the context of most organizations that are akin to a company is really very important, because what we don’t need is slower organizations. And so I think that the other part of what makes Colony have the ability to be both decentralized and agile, is that you can have different consensus, no, not consensus, but decision-making methodologies at different levels of the organization. So, you might have an organization which contains three levels. And this shouldn’t really be considered as being like a traditional hierarchy in which power is held by fewer people going up. Power is held by more people the higher up in the organization you go, because it’s kind of like circles within circles of there being fewer and fewer people as they can be nested inside one another as sort of teams within teams if necessary.

But where you might have a bias towards caution, at the largest scale of the organization, at the organization level as a whole, if you were to drill down two or three levels, you might find that you have absolutely no sort of collective decision-making required at all, but rather with funds that are owned by those teams. The consensus process was to get the funds into those teams. Once it’s in those teams, those teams are trusted to unilaterally manage those funds. And that could just be a handful of people. So, if they do want to have the motions and disputes process that we offer, then they could do. But it can be moved through faster because there are fewer people to coordinate. Or alternatively, they could just decide that actually they want to give all of the people in that, the unilateral permission to spend as much of those funds as they need to. So, the organization can be both decentralized and trustless and also agile. Because at the very edges of the organization, it requires no complicated decision-making processes to get action taken.

Simone Cicero:
I was still getting caught by these problems capabilities. So, of course, the technology. But then what are these people doing with these exactly? What are the capabilities needed to run a Colony, what organizations you are seeing emerging in this space enabled by this technology?

Jack du Rose:
I think that we have taken a view, generally that like, at base, all governance within organizations really comes down to budgeting. If you really boil it down, what are we going to spend our money on? Because that’s being spent on people for the work that they do. And everything else is just sort of garnish upon what are we spending the money on?

Aron Fischer:
It’s a budget allocation mechanism that gets filtered through a reputation system. But at the end of the day, you’re sitting somewhere, maybe you’re alone, maybe you’re with a team of four. And this whole process, once it assigns budget to you, you can go into what you plan to do, what you said you would. So, yes, Jack is right, that’s the enabling mechanism. I wanted to jump in when you said they make their own currency, or make their own token. Because of course, one of the things that blockchains allow us to do is to create these crypto tokens, crypto currencies, all kinds of tokens. I specifically want to advise not to immediately think of them as currencies, because that comes with a lot of baggage that might not apply, and you get the wrong mental models.

But what these Colony’s tokens do in the Colony system, is there an accounting of how much of the token was allocated, where and to whom. Now, whether that turns into monetary value — it doesn’t have to have monetary value, it might do later, you can start a Colony with no budget whatsoever except to pay for the Ethereum gas fees. You can generate your own pseudo currency and say, imagine we had a million bucks, what would we spend it on? And you can start spending your accounting token. And the idea is it keeps an account of precisely where you allocated them, precisely who contributed how much value to the organization. So, it’s purely a method of account. And if later down the road, you have revenue, or there’s a rally coming in, you can fall back on this account to reward people. It’s also the basis for who gets to take decisions.

A line I like to say is it’s amazing what people will do for fake internet points, right, they will for likes, for up votes, for hearts. Sometimes it’s enough just to be acknowledged. So, instead of you have a colony with no fund, say, okay, everyone is volunteer. You say, no, everyone, just, if you want to join us at this early stage, you can work and we’ll pay you in these own tokens, and we’ll have a record and you will know exactly how much everyone worked. And if you’ve done a lot of work, you will be rewarded with potentially more decision-making weight, because that’s one of the modules we have in common. And so it’s not necessarily financial, but the accounting part is crucial. It’s crucial psychologically, and it’s also for the governance because it allows to distribute decision-making weight.

Jack du Rose:
And this idea of being able to create a sort of unit of account to contribute, contributors is not something which is new to DAOs or blockchain technology. Lots of companies do that already, right, with stock options, or just the equity of their company. And it certainly can be and it is, in many cases, quite analogous to that, albeit with some important differences. And I think one of them is that it can have additional utility over and above their representation of ownership of the organization.

Simone Cicero:
At the moment, we just have equity and salary and profits, basically, in organizations. So, this money here, it needs to be — these currencies here need to model function of this. I don’t know, really.

Jack du Rose:
All of these things that you mentioned are quite cleanly definable. Tokens are, they can do more things, right? So, yeah, they’re software. They can do whatever you program, the system that uses them to be able to do. So, you can create all sorts of economic systems that use that token and then can cause it to capture value in ways that are quite different from the sort of traditional notion of equity and dividends and all that stuff.

Simone Cicero:
No, but I mean, I’m totally in line with this also because as we develop these 3EO framework, the framework that we are developing is inspired by Haier’s Rendanheyi and other progressive organizational models. We are encountering these. And I must say that also, as we transform Boundaryless itself, the company, we are moving into needing this kind of software. And we are actually building, as I said, this software ecosystem around how do you run teams inside organizations? How do you manage this profit or loss? And how do you manage the contracts between them? So, I think, for example, Colony should be part of this ecosystem, because we are building this ecosystem in a way that is much more open and inclusive. So, we want to do open source interfaces. We’re looking into what does it mean to run the DAO-based infrastructures, basically the idea that you can run an infrastructure that is trusted by all parties favoring contracts between organizations.

So, I think, again, I’m getting to these from the other perspective, the point that I was raising was more about having actual examples of companies that are using Colony, because, again, I am a bit concerned about the capabilities. So, if I think about the Colony, and its impact in the future of organizing, I’m thinking about what I’m seeing in terms of transition. So, we are transitioning into an economy which is it needs to be much more, I would say, local and small scale and cooperative. You know, when it comes to food, energy, education, welfare, how do we manage our cities, and much more. And so I was really having gone through these experiences of trying to run these projects, and kind of crashing myself into building these capabilities, and escaping from the capitalistic consumerist economy that sucks up every day. So, I think building these capabilities is crucial. I was really curious to know what kind of projects are taking up this technology, these new affordances, what are you seeing?

Jack du Rose:
We’re seeing quite a broad variety of entity types, actually. It’s been very interesting to see. We imagined that it would be primarily blockchain protocols, DeFi protocols, specifically, that would have the most pressing need for tools like Colony. And we’ve certainly seen a lot of those. And that’s because they have usually got a community, they’ve really always got a token, and they have very often got quite a substantial Treasury. And they want to be able to allocate this Treasury. And for various legal and regulatory reasons, they ultimately need to get to a place where their organization isn’t reliant on the core team anymore. They need to not have that as this point, a central point of failure. So, they need to be both technologically decentralized, which they usually already are. But they also need to be socially decentralized.

So, I think that the most serious interest comes from that space, because they have this pressing need. But what I think has been interesting is that we’ve seen, as I say, so many other different types. So, we’ve got an INGO that’s using Colony for a program in Sub Saharan Africa to enable farmers to uptake, more advanced farming methodologies, and to incentivize them to participate in this system that will get them this training, that will get them to implement certain farming practices, and get them to prove that in exchange for membership and rewards from this DAO that they’re all part of, which is a very exotic use case, they certainly would never have anticipated, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see it unfold.

Another very common one is agencies of various types, usually, design agencies, or dev shops, things like that, that typically have a relatively small internal team and work with a comparatively large external group of contributors or contractors. And they’re realizing that they can have a less sort of directional relationship between them and the freelancers. And rather, allow them to sort of become more of a team of freelancers so that they can sort of scale the capacity of their business by taking on more projects and those teams self-organizing around the new projects that come in. Rather than them needing to linearly scale their internal headcount, and therefore, fixed costs, with the increased demand upon their company. So, a kind of elasticity of organization that can scale to meet the demands the market has of it.

What else are we seeing? I think one thing that’s surprised me quite a bit, is that there’s a new kind of community emerging, which is a sort of, I think people are calling them social tokens. But that they’re basically a community of people who are like-minded, have a shared interest in something. They don’t exactly know what they want to do, but they’re going to do some stuff, and they have got a token that binds them all together. And really, as a result of the success of their community, and the growth of it ends up accruing value.

Aron Fischer:
Yeah, it’s been fascinating. So, you’ve got so many online communities on the internet. But now they have the ability to have a token, and now they can start doing things and allocating tokens to each other. And you don’t know what comes out of it. It’s not necessarily a business model. And it’s one where people love to contribute, because people love being involved in communities, even if it’s just, as I said earlier, for upvotes.

Jack du Rose:
But because these tokens are transferable and can be really owned by people, they can start layering in sort of economic models to their communities.

Aron Fischer:
But it’s not a prerequisite. And neither is a business model, or even an idea, what you want to do, just that you want to do things together, and you’ve got some shared interests. And so it’s fascinating to watch. I don’t know where this is going yet. But we see a lot of these interests from just online communities who want to self-organize better. It’s like we’ve got our forum, and we’ve got our discord chat channels, and we want to see what more we can do as a collective.

Jack du Rose:
And then I think the final type of organization, which is perhaps the most surprising to me, of all, but actually seems to be one of the most serious is, I want to say, legacy businesses, like traditional companies of significant size that are for whatever reason, deciding now is the time for us to decentralize. We want to dissolve our company, and we want to make it into a DAO. And I really didn’t see this coming at this point. I thought it could happen in the future. But it’s been very, very surprising to see that happening.

One that has really just taken that idea and run with it is one of the very earliest crypto exchanges called ShapeShift. That just earlier on in this year made the announcement that they were going to decentralize their entire organization, their company would be sunset, and it would just become a DAO, ultimately. I’m speaking to another quite large company in London, in the music industry next week about doing the same kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s really very surprising and very interesting, how seriously, I suppose, DAOs are getting taken all of a sudden.

Aron Fischer:
And I think it has to do with, I mean, the real progress we’ve made to make them easy to interact with. I mean, what Jack was saying, the DAOs are to companies like video games are to board games. Well, the video games we’ve had in the past have been like console-based text adventures. And we’re now finally getting to the point of, you know, with graphics and clicky and fun. Like the Colony app, as it’s been developed, evolving over the past few years, it’s finally getting into a point where, I mean, we’re all really proud of what’s come out of it. Like, I could show this to someone and not be embarrassed by how complex it is and how hard it is to use it. It took a lot of work. I mean, the crypto space is very new, the tooling is missing or non-existent. And to get it to this point where you’ve been able to hide a lot of the abstractions and a lot of the complexity to make it intuitive, that’s huge effort but it’s paying off in that we’ve broadened the number of people who are able to interact with the system tremendously.

Stina Heikkila:
This is really fascinating. And it kind of — I had a question for a while, like, how this kind of process starts, right? You have such a wide variety of examples. So, does it necessarily have to start from scratch where people come together and like okay, we want to do something. Or could you, do you think, be like a kind of evangelist for this in your organization and try to convince people? Or does it require, like a sort of people navigating towards it? And the second part of the question is like, what do you do in terms of sort of awareness raising or educational elements more than just making it more available, like you described? Do you give some kind of coaching or — very curious to hear more about —

Simone Cicero:
Who programmed the Colony?

Jack du Rose:
So, it’s actually a little bit difficult for us to say how it comes about in existing organizations. Because we get a relatively narrow window into it. We generally don’t find that we get like, everybody in an organization turning up and saying, we want to do this thing. There’s usually a single point person. And, yeah, it’s very hard for us to tell whether this is because there’s broad desire within the organization to do this, or it’s, that person wants to lead the endeavor. And it’s got a bit to between their teeth about DAO-ifying. For the two examples that I’ve given, no, three examples, it’s been all different levels, actually. So, in the case of the INGO, as I understand it, somebody who’s really very junior in the organization, and has just gradually managed to sell this idea into the whole thing, which is amazing. And in others, it comes from the top, it comes from the CEO, which is sort of equally amazing, really.

Aron Fischer:
But crucially, it doesn’t require buy-in from the whole organization to just get started. Like, it’s possible to just do it within your small team, and nobody needs to know. And if it works for you, then you’re a colony within a larger organization that could also exist.

Simone Cicero:
I guess that in most of the organizations I work with, you should ask for permission to do that. But that’s a guess.

Jack du Rose:
It’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission.

Simone Cicero:
Right, right. I mean, this is the difference between the people that at some point evolve and often, change organizations than the others that wait for permission.

Jack du Rose:
I think that’s actually a really interesting point, right? Because you wouldn’t be saying the same about just using, like picking up Asana or Trello, or something like that, right, or some other SAS piece of software. You wouldn’t think this is going to be a really consequential thing in the context of this organization. Why is it different, if you’ve got some unit of account, that is this sort of coordinating factor behind people? It feels like DAOs as a piece of software are getting treated quite differently. And it’s really just an organizing technique. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that. But the interesting thing is that it can be.

Simone Cicero:
I mean, you’re talking about two things here. One is the DAO and one is contribution accounting and reputation.

Jack du Rose:
I think these are one in the same thing.

Simone Cicero:
I don’t know, because DAOs are a lot of layers and models. Like, you have the consensus part, then you have the voting part, and then you have this reputation part, and you are modeling this very well in the Colony software and white paper. And I think this reputation and value accounting thing, especially if you apply that into the team is completely different than applying that in a trustless space. So, in a team it’s very trusted. So, the problem here is how do we work and how do we account value? What do we value? How do we distribute our financial? But it’s much more of a cultural and praxis thing. So, you need to, you know, we use contribution accounting in our company. It’s been 10 years, maybe.

I’ve been working in many companies doing contribution accounting, and it’s always complicated to understand how much do we value these? How do we exchange? How do we vote on these? And there are practices that we have been using, like for example, at Boundaryless, most of the times when we’ve worked in governance, we basically self-distribute using matrices of percentages, and we just set kind of an average of the value of the task. And this is the dark matter. It’s about me having a different reputation in the organization. So, having legitimacy to take decisions, but it’s not just to solve the problem, or this capability thing.

And I think I want to enter in the last part of this conversation, just to connect these with another thing that I don’t know — I’m not sure I was catching on your podcast or just another one. But I think it was maybe Vitalik Buterin who said that, that Oracles cannot be made secure through crypto economics alone. Okay. Which I think it’s another hint that there is a certain dark matter, that it’s not a matter of technology. Rather, it’s a matter of avoiding technology in terms of, for example, having a critical relationship with these technologies. And I mean, quoting, for example, or connecting these with the concept of conviviality, for example. Which is, to some extent, critical with regards to the use and adoption of technology in our societies. So, when I speak about this, what do you feel?

Aron Fischer:
So, on the one hand, when you interface with a colony from the outside, you don’t have to know how the internal decision-making works, you don’t even have to know it’s a decentralized autonomous organization or a company pretending to be a DAO. So, when you said it, within a company, you can’t just run a DAO, of course, you can. Because what does the rest of the management see above you? It sees that your department is doing things and you must be managing it well, if it does things well. And they don’t need to know — they will need to care that you’re using this DAO software to run it.

Simone Cicero:
That’s exactly one of the points that I was making. For example, adopting these inside an organization to distribute, for example, reputation. So, money, because most likely your money comes from your salary. So, you cannot distribute money inside an organization. And this is exactly the premise that you started from, Jack, that is all about distributing money. And here, you don’t have money. Okay. You distribute the tokens, so you can distribute the reputation. But if this happens inside a bureaucracy, it’s just the industrial economy replicating itself and destroying the planet, basically. So, the question is, should we use these in a way that is critical towards what we actually do with these colonies? And I mean, for example, working on education, working on food production, working on welfare, working on creating energy infrastructures.

Aron Fischer:
Great questions. And with a lot of these, we can think that, what are the problems? Why aren’t we addressing some of these big questions, why aren’t we addressing these big topics? Is it a failure of leadership? Is it a failure of resources, of funds? Maybe a bit of all of those things. Now, what we’re hoping is that with these DAO-like tools, it’s easy to get a lot of people to start working on a problem without needing to get permission without even needing to get funds a priori. All you need is like a community of like-minded individuals, and you get going. And it should be just as easy as launching a group on Reddit, on Facebook or Google group, right? You click it together, you find people, you start doing. That’s all it takes. And if you are actually making progress in an area that interests people, whether it’s education, or the environment, that will be inspiring, more people will join and these things scale tremendously fast.

So, sometimes we don’t have to get 80% — 100% of the way there. Maybe it’s just, maybe the first 20 is the important part, just get things going. And then letting it run on its own dynamic, on dynamism. And the ability to easily create an organization with a few clicks, to easily set up, even if it’s not money, just a token, pretend it’s money start accruing. It’s tremendously powerful. So, when you say, how do we ensure or how do we incentivize that DAOs are used to address the topics that we all want to address, like, I am not sure that’s the right question. We already all want to address these problems. The question, why aren’t we doing it now, and what does it take for us to be able to do so? I mean, I don’t have the answer, but flexibility and ease of coordination are definitely going to be important ingredients to it.

Simone Cicero:
It’s a problem worth working on, you mean.

Jack du Rose:
And I think it makes it easier for people to aggregate around similar problems, right? Because it’s, well, it’s boundaryless. It doesn’t require anybody to be in any particular place, if you believe in a particular set of values that one organization has, given the permission-lessness that these organizations can have to participating in them, you can just go, show up, start contributing value and have a say and be useful.

Simone Cicero:
A specific question to maybe get these to the end, Jack and Aron, so this, to me, sounds a lot like an infrastructure, a knowledge infrastructure that we are building. Because you don’t have any as a service, or another kind of infrastructure building. And probably if you do that, of course, you will be in a decentralized way. So, you will probably have a run your own infrastructure.

Jack du Rose:
That’s exactly what we think of Colony as being, organizational infrastructure for the internet.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah. Because you have, essentially, this idea of having all these organizations, to an extent, being connected to this network, right? And so there, I think there are the network effects. And there, there is the dark matter in these marketplaces of people connected. So, we have to really make those infrastructures connect people and change. Because there is where there is the capability to become better, to learn, to exchange faster, to relate with the others.

Jack du Rose:
But by dark matter, do you mean some exotic but nebulous, sort of aspect to an organization that really gives it its substance, but you can’t really define?

Simone Cicero:
Mastery in anything you do, because essentially, we started with saying, is it a commoditization of organizing, you said no? And I said entrepreneurship can never be commoditized. It’s always in Genesis phase. So, that’s the exact point we’re talking about when we say the dark matter. Okay. The technology, the technology can become a utility, but the entrepreneurship in terms of value chains, entrepreneurship, it cannot be commoditized. It’s a Genesis act. So, this is the capability I’m talking about. So, of course, we need the technology and I really loved this project. But maybe the question will be, how do we connect these capabilities so that people can learn from each other and generate these platforms, that really, on top of the technology, make these changes happen? So, maybe this is the future, where we can go with also — where you could go also with Colony? What do you think?

Jack du Rose:
I actually think this is one of the beautiful things about decentralized open source permissionless frameworks and tools.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, it can be built.

Jack du Rose:
Absolutely. They’re composable and they’re open for anybody to just decide that they are going to start adding value and layering them on top of one another. And then, yeah, it ends up this sort of wonderful mosaic of all sorts of different components, and you don’t really, in some cases, know where one ends and another begins.

Simone Cicero:
I think you guys are really doing interesting work. And I really encourage all our listeners to catch up with what you’re doing, with your podcast, with your white paper, which is a bit too nerdy for me. But I was looking for videos on YouTube, like a synthetic review of the white paper, but I couldn’t find it. So, I had to read it. [crosstalk]

Aron Fischer:
It is a technical white paper, yeah.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, that’s it. But I mean, this is essential. It’s like the bare mark, that you need to run the organization in a way that is according to what we shared within the conversation, also, with this impetus to actually make things happen, which I like very much. Stina, I don’t know if you have some closing thoughts before we just asked for more information about where to find all this great stuff.

Stina Heikkila:
I love the metaphor, board game and video game, like thinking like that really helps. And starting to see those kind of interfaces, and even someone like myself, who would be a bit put off by all the maths in the white paper, and say, “oh, yeah, I don’t know if this is for me”. But I think this conversation has really made me feel more like, “okay, I understand a bit more now what it could be”. Like, if we have Trello, why not have the DAO for similar sort of purposes, but much more advanced and much more interesting and exciting. So, thanks a lot for the conversation. It was really interesting.

Jack du Rose:
Yeah, this has been fun.

Simone Cicero:
So, guys, I just lost the bit, if you want to just give a couple of pointers to our listeners to find what you do.

Jack du Rose:
Absolutely. So, you can find our website at Colony.io, and you can follow us on Twitter at JoinColony. And you can, via our website is probably the easiest way to get to our discord community, which is really where we both do the work of building Colony. And we welcome everybody who’s interested in DAOs, decentralization, new forms of organizing to come and contribute and share their thoughts and ideas.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much. Aron, do you want to add a couple of bits?

Aron Fischer:
No, that’s pretty much it. Go to Colony.io and join our discord because we’re all there, most days. We’ll happily answer questions and you’ll find, again, like-minded people willing to discuss. I mean, that is the first step, find like-minded people. It’s step one in any online community building, and our discord is currently the place to do it.

Simone Cicero:
Probably that’s how you do it, actually, by connecting it with a community to practice. So, thank you so much. It was an amazing conversation. I’m happy that the season started like that. Thank you so much again.

Jack du Rose:
Thank you. It’s been great.

Aron Fischer:
Thanks.

Simone Cicero:
And to our listeners, catch up soon.